Rust your ARM microcontroller | Hacker News Reader

Rust your ARM microcontroller

blog.japaric.io

249 pointsmiqkt16 comments

Incredible.

Here I was expecting another small project and instead this post delivers in spades. Awesome to see svd2rust, there's definitely a couple edge cases(global #define) that bindgen doesn't quite cleanly handle yet and that's a clean solution to it.

Nice. That's what Rust is really good for.

This is a deluxe environment, with a debugger built in. In the next episode, they add a CPU dispatcher.

I had no idea Rust MCU support has come so far, the generated code is indeed very lean. This is fantastic! God I'd love to use this, but ESP8266/ESP32 is where its at right now (at least for me).

I take it Rust is not supported on ESP8266 yet?

Nope, LLVM doesn't have a backend for the Xtensa architecture.

You could potentially go via C. https://github.com/draperlaboratory/llvm-cbe

IIRC the C backend lags LLVM pretty far. Thankfully, rust tries to be compatible among a few different generations of LLVM, so maybe it's feasible.

Looks dead. No commits for almost 2 years.

I suspect you'd be much better off with a Rust MIR -> C compiler. Rust's memory and execution model is much closer to C than C is to LLVM.

The C backend was expelled from LLVM several years ago because it was too buggy and nobody wanted to fix it and since then has hardly been updated. That doesn't seem like a very pleasant route.

Some Espressif guy is said to be working on a backend for LLVM, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

I'd say ESP* is 'it' for a very small set of people. The Cortex M cores are significantly more ubiquitous.

I think Aparicio himself is a decent-sized part of that support.

BTW, regarding ESP8266 [1]

[1] http://hackaday.com/2017/01/04/rust-running-on-the-realtek-r...

++ to japaric driving embedded Rustlang development. He's built a lot of the low-level tooling, and many of the articles/tutorials are form him as well.

Re: RTL8710... That was me! :) I haven't had much chance to continue hacking on the RTL8710 (we just moved, hobbies are still packed away) but I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get up and running.

Especially considering how little I know about embedded development, I imagine someone with more knowledge would be a lot more productive.

Brilliant.

I worked on getting rust to run on an arm core a few years ago, and the process was honestly pretty miserable. This is so far ahead from what I had going, it is hardly comparable. Looks like a very streamlined and elegant process. Excellent work.

Very interesting work. I'm looking forward to when I'll be able to use Rust to write production ARM code (I mostly use NXP Kinetis devices, but it seems most of the tooling is universal).

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